Obama Still Isn’t a Realist (II)

Realists shouldn’t see the West Point speech as an utter disaster, of course. Its emphasis on shifting more defense burdens onto allies has been compared favorably to the Nixon Doctrine. Yet though the administration’s foreign policy may contain some realist elements, a few trees do not make a forest. The president implied he wasn’t a realist. We should take him at his word.

There are a few reasons why this matters. The first is the need to produce accurate analysis. If we try to explain Obama’s foreign policy while laboring under the wrong assumptions about what it is and what it has tried to do, we will come up with the wrong answers. Misreading Obama as a realist because we would prefer him to be one is just as misleading as it is when neoconservatives and liberal hawks do the same thing in their polemics. The second is the need to understand where the administration has gone wrong and why. It is not an accident that the biggest mistakes that Obama has made on foreign policy also happen to be when he has paid the least attention to those he dismisses as “self-described realists,” and some of his modest successes have come from the “realist elements” that Gay mentions. Take Russia policy, for instance. When U.S. Russia policy prioritized working with Russia on matters of common interest, relations with Moscow measurably improved and the U.S. made some modest gains on a few issues. When Washington returned to its old habits of agitating over internal Russian affairs and seeking to overthrow Russian clients, relations went into rapid decline. Since then, U.S. punitive measures have contributed to the intensifying Sino-Russian cooperation that Gay refers to. Finally, there is a danger of applying these labels so indiscriminately and defining them so broadly that they cease to have any descriptive value. If the realist label can be applied so widely to so many different figures with opposing views, it no longer tells us anything about anyone’s views except that he isn’t a knee-jerk interventionist.

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8 Responses to Obama Still Isn’t a Realist (II)

Obama is a lightweight liberal hawk whose instincts are to avoid military action. He still wants to promote values and foreign policy and he seems to ineffective moderate in his policy. Like everything else he does, the majority tend to agree with general policies but he looks ineffective in doing his programs.

Still think the salami is being sliced too thin. He isn’t a neo con. He is, as has been mentioned, “a lightweight liberal hawk whose instincts are to avoid military action.” And that sounds, to me, at least halfway between “realist” and “liberal interventionist.” In his speech, he explicitly repeated his “Goldilocks” stance, not siding with those who quote Washington and are “self proclaimed” realists, but distancing himself equally from those, on the neo con right and lib interventionist left, who would use military force virtually all the time.

“If the realist label can be applied so widely to so many different figures with opposing views, it no longer tells us anything about anyone’s views except that he isn’t a knee-jerk interventionist.”

Well, it seems to me that that is all you’re gonna get, when it comes to realism and the US Presidency: a non knee jerk interventionist. Somewhat who rejects interventionism on a more categorical basis, who rejects “exceptionalism” and America’s “mission in the world” completely, is simply not going to be elected President, not yet anyway.

And I still think the taxonomy makes sense. Bill Clinton and Obama and perhaps Biden are realists. Hillary Clinton and the rest of the War Harpies are liberal interventionists. Bush II, and his crew, and most current national Republican figures, are neo con interventionists. Ron Paul, who did reject exceptionalism and the notion of a US “mission,” perhaps, comes closest to being an actual “isolationist” (and could never be President for that, and other, reasons), while Rand Paul seems more like a realist in the Bill Clinton/Obama vein.

Obama’s claim to realism is that he is only willing to bully others when it appears that he won’t or can’t be made to pay for it (e.g., supporting the NATO air campaign in Libya, bombing weddings and goat herds along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border). It’s not much, admittedly. But just being unwilling to risk American lives for no real reason is the best that a realist can expect from a President, in a time when no one is truly capable of defeating our military in a standing engagement without bringing the world to an end.

Here is his wish list that the chickenhawk congress will probably sign off on: $5,000,000,000 for the “anti-terror” fund. $1,000,000,000 for more Europe/NATO free riding security agreements.

All the while with $17,000,000,000+ nat’l debt..

Definitely not a Realist. Anybody can read the tea leaves and realize that these are not popular policies.

I guess this is Obama thinking he is some sort of Lincoln and making “hard” choices by signing checks that don’t exist and creating enemies out of thin air and artificial escalations of a China-Russia “cold-war.”